Smiling with Pleasure

Thanks to new techniques, having perfect and healthy teeth is possible. A first-person account of the pleasure of smiling again.

Veneers, implants…The new dental methods allow us to have the teeth we’ve always dreamed of.

One of the benefits of having close female friends is that they pull you down to earth. That’s what happened to me a few months ago, when one of my friends who has been there for me over 20 years asked : “Why did you stop laughing and start making that angry princess smile?”. Because I’d rather be a bored princess than Cinderella’s sister… When my baby teeth were replaced by the permanent ones, I got a new set of teeth and a problem. The right side of my mouth was missing a canine. An irritating asymmetry that others found amusing and made me sad. a At the age of six , I began to envy my grandmother’s teeth. At that time my goal in life was to grow up fast, work fast and get teeth like hers even faster.

When I was 12 years old, when some of my friends started to wear braces, I tried to convince the dentist to put me one too. I heard a resounding no that reduced me to the insignificance of a teenager with imperfect teeth. I don’t remember how I solved the dilemma, but the truth is that, at 20 years old, I laughed without restraint. But years later, things got much worse. The lack of that canine jumped out at me whenever I looked in the mirror. Once when I went to a television program, I made the mistake of, afterwards, getting home and looking at myself on the screen. And I hated myself! It was on that fateful day that I made the decision never to show my teeth to anyone, including myself. And I started to practice that angry princess smile. I trained so hard and so well. In fact, I started to use it in all situations no matter how funny they were. No laughing! Smiling without showing my teeth has become an automatic gesture for me. Of course, I could go to the dentist and ask him to pull all my teeth out and put some Years on me! put on and take off. I was going to hear the answer that had already been given to me many times: “What is important is to have healthy teeth, symmetrical or not”. But at the age of 30 I wanted straight, natural teeth that looked like mine. And not that thing that you could see right away was fake.

I made one more attempt to resolve the matter with braces when, a few years ago, everyone started wearing colored elastics in their mouths. But advances in technique and aesthetics still had no application in my case. Even more recently, everyone around me has decided to switch from braces to new teeth. It wasn’t my grandmother’s removable thing, but the end result wasn’t much different.

Hollywood and Globo stars changed the shape of their teeth and got beautiful mouths. If they could, one day I would get there. Someone would do things like that in Portugal.

And isn’t that what they already do? A few months ago, at a congress I attended for work reasons, I found out that there is a Portuguese doctor who knows how to make smiles like those of movie stars. The following week I made an appointment with Paula Sequeiros. I explained to her what had been troubling me for over 30 years. I saw before and after pictures of people with mouths much worse than mine and I found out what veneers are: very thin porcelain layers glued over our teeth, which are prepared by the millimeter for this purpose.
For the first time in my life I was in front of someone who understood me and I left there, happy, to go for an X-ray that allowed me to see my teeth inside and out.

The following week, faced with that panoramic view of my mouth, I had a shock when I heard her tell me that just as important as having beautiful teeth was having healthy teeth. For a split second I thought I was going to hear the same thing over and over again: “Your teeth are great. Let it be as it is!” But not. After all, despite the annual trips to the dentist, my teeth were not as good as I had imagined and I had two root canals to treat. Many years of cigarettes and bad brushing also required a visit to the Hygienist. I was going to put veneers, of course, but only after all this was taken care of. Two weeks later, my teeth were clean and healthy and the temporary teeth were ready. For four hours, Paula Sequeiros prepared my teeth for the famous veneers. Temporaries were placed based on a previous mock-up: why did she have to have that mock-up thing? “We have to decide if this is how you want it, if there are no changes to be made. Also, today your gums are
going to be very sensitive. After being prepared, your teeth need protection, so we’re going to put temporary ones”, she explained to me. It was four interminable hours…Not because it hurts, but because doubts assaulted me: what if I got worse? If you don’t like the result? I knew that from that day on, there was no turning back. After the teeth were prepared, the only way out was those veneers. They were going to last forever. Until the end of my life, I was going to keep my teeth just like I was going to get out of there…The temporary teeth, to tell you the whole truth, were very nice, but it was clear that they weren’t mine. I mean, I noticed! I was the only one. My sisters thought that I had finally decided to dye my hair to hide the whites. My friends thought that I was prettier and that the separation was making me better and better. I thought that the temporary teeth were slightly rough and I decided to call to ask if the veneers would be like that too. “No no! The veneers are smoother than your own teeth”, Paula Sequeiros promised me.

And finally, the big day arrived. The veneers were ready, they had arrived from Spain, where they were made, by a special technician who managed the miracle of giving them a natural look. For an entire afternoon, each of the porcelain veneers was glued on top of each of my teeth. In the end, when I looked into the mirror, I realized why 19th-century Romantic writers described heroines’ teeth as pearls.

This is how my teeth are now. Straight, smooth, perfect and will last for the rest of my life. Unlike my grandmother, I won’t need to use a removable dentures because porcelain veneers protect my teeth and prevent cavities and other diseases. One dental trip per year to Paula Sequeiros’s office and efficient brushing is all I need.

I stopped using the “angry princess smile” and went back to showing all my teeth. I started to hear things like: “You’re younger” or “Did you have Botox?”. I always explain that I didn’t, that I changed my teeth and laughed again like before.

Author: Maria João Vieira
Source: ELLE Magazine
Date: November 2009